So what the hell is a “Mathematical Formula for Love” I hear you say. Well, y’know, if your brain is wired a certain way then you think of things, you think about lots of things, hundreds of things every week, thousands of things every month, millions of things every year. This is just another one. Y’know. Just. Think. Okay. Well, here it is. My mathematical formula for love:

∃! n ∈ ℕ: n+1 <3

Short explanation: There exists exactly one number, an element of the Natural numbers (excluding zero), such that the number plus one is less than three. That number is 1, and 1+1 <3 Of course, you know that <3 represents love, y’know like a heart 🙂

Ireland are the 4th best team in Europe. Well they could be. Okay, it’s possible. Yes, it may not be probable. But the logic is sound… The 2 teams who qualified from Irelands group (Spain, Italy) have made it all the way to the final. So it’s possible that Croatia and Ireland (the 2 teams who didn’t qualify from our group) were better than all the other teams in the tournament. We can’t know for sure because neither team got a chance to play beyond the group stage. But we do know that Spain & Italy beat everyone they played, so Croatia & Ireland may have been the “best of the rest”. Therefore it is possible Croatia are the 3rd best team in Europe, and Ireland are the 4th best team in Europe. QED. In logic we trust.

Manic Depression. What does it mean to you? A Jimi Hendrix song. Something other people have. Something weirdos have. An old name for bipolar disorder. The bane of your life. The bane of the life of someone you know and care about. Something else? For me it’s something to laugh at. And to cry at. Ha ha. *cries* I’ll simply make these observations:

People with manic depression should be thankful for the manic part.

The irony of depression driven apathy and suicidal tendencies is the apathy means you couldn’t be arsed doing it.

“River Deep Mountain High” – no doubt a song about a womans love for manic depression.

I love being bipolar so much I just want to curl up and sleep forever.

My favourite anagram of “manic depression” is “man dies in corpse”.

Laugh and the whole world laughs with you, Cry and the whole world laughs AT you.

I think the Grand Old Duke of York was bipolar, because when he was up he was up, and when he was down he was down.

Of course I don’t have manic depression, although I may have the milder form of it which I call Calm Malaise :p Responsible bit, if you have been affected by any of the issues discussed in this blog you can get more information here: DBSA.

Christopher Potter You Are Here is a very interesting read. That is if you’re at all interested in the Universe (or Multiverse), our solar system, our planet (that’s Earth for most of us), and our species (Homo Sapiens Sapiens [sic]). And of course how all of the above came about and evolved. If you’re not interested in any of the above, or believe it didn’t evolve, then you’re probably a monkey tapping away at a keyboard and you’ve inevitably typed this URL and you’re here. Hey, there’s a banana behind you!

One surprising thing about this book is that, apart from the cover art, there is not a single picture, photograph, sketch, illustration, table, graph or anything. The book is 274 pages of alphanumeric text. Not that one wants a cartoon, but understanding the topics covered lends itself well to pictorial representation.

Last night Jupiter was pretty close to our Moon, or at least it appeared that way from my reference frame, Earth 😉 So I unleashed my camera, did some time-lapse astro-photography, and made a movie using those images. The big bright thing that looks like the Sun – that is actually sunlight, reflected from the Moons surface. Below and to the right of the Moon, that bright ‘star’ – that is actually sunlight, reflected from Jupiter 🙂

In addition to our Moon, and Jupiter; you’ll also see several constellations including the Pleiades, Taurus, Orion (including Betelgeuse, and the Orion nebula aka M42), and Gemini. Although having looked at how Windows Movie Maker and YouTube have ‘massaged’ the images I’m greatly disappointed. Does anyone know some decent software to generate movies from JPEG or .CR2 or similar filetypes? Anyway, here’s the video… Continue reading →

You’ve just bought a new car or motorbike and you’ve got to get it registered. Many of us like to get a vehicle registration number that we like, rather than a random string of alphanumeric symbols. Some countries allow personalised number plates that stay with the person, not the vehicle. Not so in Ireland, where the registration stays with the vehicle for life.

I like the Irish registration system because it’s both informative and simple, like me lol. Each vehicle is assigned a registration in a format like this “11 – D – 12345”. The “11” corresponds to the year of registration of the vehicle i.e. 2011. The “D” is the county where the vehicle was registered i.e. Dublin in this example. The “12345” is a unique number for that year for that county, beginning at “1” (for the first car of the year) and incrementing for each subsequent vehicle registration. So the first vehicle registered in Dublin in 2011 was 11-D-1, the 123rd registered in Dublin in 2011 was 11-D-123, and so on. Continue reading →

While reading a New Scientist article entitled “Ultimate Logic: To infinity and beyond” I enjoyed reading about the distinction between “countable infinity” (e.g. 1,2,3,4,…) and “continuum infinity” (e.g. 0.1, 0.2,… 0.01, 0.02, …, 0.001, 0.002, …, …). It’s something I had realised myself (as I’m sure many others have) – different ‘levels’ of infinity. Of course I didn’t use those fancy terms and I’m 140 years after Georg Cantor first proposed it, so no prizes for being first. But…

But I thought further* and realised that the counting infinity and continuum infinity become one and the same when the counting step is, you guessed it, infinitesimally small i.e. 0.000…1

* perhaps further than some mathematicians; if not then I expect one will soon point out the flaw in my logic 🙂

Similarly in physics I find the concept of an atom i.e. an indivisible piece of matter, to be illogical in the physical world. Given the equivalence of matter and energy (E = mc2), it seems to me that any such fundamental particle (i.e. a truly atomic particle) would have an energy equivalence which is infinitesimally small. So it seems to me that any search for “fundamental particle(s)” is flawed, however worthwhile the search is itself. I say that since an infinitesimally small amount of energy may not physically exist, and if it does it’s undetectable with our instrumentation.

Finally, it seems to me that just because something is proven in mathematics, doesn’t imply it must exist in the physical world. Or is there a proof to show this false?

Recently the question of the units of energy in Einsteins E = mc2 came up in conversation. It seems the “meters squared” caused confusion. So here’s a short derivation of the units for energy.

The speed of light in a vacuum is denoted ‘c’ (lower case). The mass of a particle is ‘m’. E is energy.
The units in E = mc2 are derived as follows:
E = mc2 (Eqn. 1)
E = Energy, measured in units of Joule
m = mass, measured in units of kg
c = speed, measured in units of ms-1 (meters per second)
Note that ‘^’ denotes “raised to the power” e.g. c2 = “c raised to the power 2” i.e. squared.

In my previous blog post I spoke about Bear Grylls book Facing Up which is about his attempt at climbing Mount Everest. It was a good start in getting to know Bear Grylls the man. But this book Mud Sweat And Tears is Bears autobiography and it should be definitive in answering the question: Is he the real deal, or is he too good to be true? Spoiler: He’s the real deal.

He’s an Etonian, he’s passed SAS Selection, he’s the youngest Briton to have reached the summit of Mount Everest, and we’ve all seen his death-defying and stomach-churning ‘antics’ on Bear Grylls Born Survivor (aka Man vs Wild). There’s no question he’s the real deal. He’s a committed family man and father to his 3 young sons. It’s good to see the first ‘F’ in Bears 5 F’s is for Family (the others are Friends, Faith [meh, nobody is perfect!], Fun, Follow your dream). Bear has the privilege of being Chief Scout to the UK Scout Association; and as a former Scout myself I can only imagine how inspirational he is to Scouts (and people) all over the world.